


arbiter of many things, daylight among them

by bossymarmalade (maggie), maggie



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Gen, Jewish Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-27 22:02:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21125957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggie/pseuds/bossymarmalade, https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggie/pseuds/maggie
Summary: Mr. Solomons has a morning routine.





	arbiter of many things, daylight among them

**Author's Note:**

> slightly modified from its posting on tumblr [tommyplum](https://tommyplum.tumblr.com/).

When you’re a baker, see, it’s the sun wot’s got to ask you first out of everyone if it can please come in. 

Because Alfie gets up when there’s still more time yawning on the back side of the day than the front, and in that dark he performs his morning ablutions the same as he’s done every morning since he was old enough to do more than wipe off the clinging night’s sweat and the other, more sordid emissions, and what he does is this:

He washes his face, and the corners of his eyes, and he blows his nose, and he does not fail to attend to the back of his neck and behind his ears. Since he was old enough to deliver parcels of clean laundry, Alfie's mornings have consisted of this, washing and darkness and liminality, a brew of sleepy soapiness in the in-between. As he washes, the sun makes a faint appeal in the distance behind him, through the craquelated green glass of his bathroom window, and Alfie tells it no. Not yet. Not _nearly_ yet.

And he combs water through his hair (not scented water, not continental Portugal nor New World Florida), just plain ice-cold water to fully wake him up with a shock down his already shocked and shivered spine; at least that’s what Alfie tells himself so he doesn’t have to answer the sciatica that’s already waving him a big fat fucking HULLOOOO, ALFIE, HULLO!! 

Forget that. Ignore that, for as long as the dark dim morning allows. Let it ride away on the soap slick until later.

So it’s ice-cold water through his hair on the teeth of the comb and as Alfie dresses, the sun wants to know if it’s time, yet, and Alfie yet again says no. Retrieves the jewelry from the small hobnail bowl of milk glass he keeps it in, his rings of gold, and he gilds himself knuckle by knuckle, because he has no need to worry about dough paste being caught in the creases of his skin, because he has a desk behind which to crenellate himself from the mixing and the kneading and rank sweat of workaday labour.

He collects his cane, hullo Alfie hullo. 

Uses it to unpeg the hat that is hanging in his hall and on some mornings, like this morning, Alfie gives his father's hat leave to make a circumference around the head of his cane – just to let it see some of the world again, you understand, to let it taste the circumnavigation that it used to take for granted in a generation gone by – before the hat takes up its new circumvented existence in its place atop his ice-cold hair. 

And the sun! Hasn't forgotten its daily request. Asks one more time, the third time, if it can come in as Alfie opens his front door and rocks himself out onto the street, and Alfie says no, no, no, you may not;

–-because for every new day that wants to begin in Camden Town, Alfie Solomons is its rabbi, and it’s his flour and water and yeast that perform as the beit din, and it is his spit as he talks and talks his way towards the other end of night that serves as the mikvah, and so _no, no, no_, he tells the sun. It is a receival of a request and a subsequent negotiation that he performs very single morning, as Alfie Solomons the Bonny Street baker, because his job, well -- it's all about converts, and conversions, innit? When it comes right down to it.

So when Alfie comes back out of the bakery with ink or blood or leavening touched to his fingertips, ready to knock back around home for a proper bath and a cuppa, and the sun is rising over the rooftops, he’s ready for it and finally, this time, he offers no rebuff. 

Alfie taps his cane. Tugs at his hat. 

_Hullo._


End file.
